No one had ever told me that before, and I always did my best to avoid discomfort and pain. Now, I have a much different story.
That is, we all have an ideal self that we aspire to, and when we don't live up to this ideal, we feel bad.
At first, I thought maybe it was NECESSARY to feel bad in order to motivate oneself to reach your ideals.
Then, I thought that it might be impossible to feel good when we reach our ideals without feeling bad when we don't. That is, maybe the two are dualistic, by nature, and inseparable.
But, as I thought more and more about my past and how children operate, I became convinced that it's not natural to judge/chastise yourself when you don't live up to your ideals. For me, it's primarily a trained behavior that resulted from judgmental parenting styles -- think, a parent making a child thinking they are a 'bad boy' when they've done something wrong.
It's entirely possible to feel good about yourself when you reach your ideals without feeling bad when you don't -- it just takes a bit of rewiring. If you have any doubt, spend some time around children and you'll see that humans are naturally incredibly resilient to failure -- this should include failure at being happy.
I still struggle with smoking, I would rather feel nothing then feel the mental pain. I'm just rather torn, through my years of depression feeling terrible has never felt productive it feels repetitive.
Key to making it through the paying back the piper is faith. Trust that your body is far more intelligent than you and it has all the answers to making yourself healthy again. Both physically and mentally.
Slightly boring (I hate reading these patient's stories and details of psychological experiments) but the conclusions are priceless.
You can do this on your own but I would suggest getting experience and practice with a guide.
This is the manual DIY version of psychedelic therapy that is so useful for healing the trauma beneath addiction.
I am currently working more and more with the ACT Matrix [1] and while I am not a psychologist I find it a great and easy to use tool to explore and understand emotions and behavior which is imo the first step towards building psychological flexibility to deal with stressful triggers/emotions, etc. I can only advocate for having a look and giving it a chance. In scientific/clinical circles it’s pretty high regarded as well :)
If that means bringing trauma to the forefront of your mind in order to get a dopamine hit, so be it.
1. Everything is allowed (especially what already happened.).
2. I may accept consequences (if I wish), but I must not accept any blame.
Denying reality, however bad it may be, hurts in the end more since this sometimes subtly, sometimes not so subtly influences action to avoid the thing I denied out of being. Once everything is allowed there is not much necessity to deny the thing that is stopping you (me in this case). Imagine a central belief that can bring many useful actions to a halt just by being there.
Blame is from other people. You can deny all blame. You do not have to blame yourself. That's a thing which I haven't been taught before. Since I did rather the reverse, it needed the exact opposite to work out. Only consequences are physical. That's why only those matter.
Sound familiar :) Whenever I read some headline like this my thought pattern is almost always the same: 'nice someone also figured this and published this, nice this is on HN, but I figured this out already x years ago and it didn't help a thing, truly wonder if it's going to help someone else'. I like mind-expanding drugs which let my thoughts go ways they don't often go when fully sober and the amount of epiphanies I had through those experiences are numerous. And one of the first was definitely identifying the childhood/youth problems and seeing them as the base for later problems in behaviour. But just like the article doesn't really mention a solution in detail, just 'working on it', most of the ideas I have on how to actually deal with problematic behaviour either don't work or are for some reason too hard to sustain. The longest I succeeded in breaking a certain behaviour was 2 or 3 weeks, then I slowly slipped back into it. And even though fully aware of that, no deal. tldr; identifying causes doesn't seem too hard, identifying working solutions for psychological problems is where it's at. Maybe if mindfulness is a solution for you, you should blog on it..
I've been practicing mindfulness lately, noticing the "shape" of sensations in the body, and it struck me that, physically, the withdrawal symptoms felt a lot like how I feel when I'm working through trauma.
I had the sense that, if I could work up the courage to face it and work through it (specifically, to practice mindfulness on the extremely unpleasant sensations), the addiction would eventually dissolve.
So I did a double take, when I saw my own thoughts at the top of HN!